Sex, Mom, and God

by Frank Schaeffer

  Mom typed in a way that should have caused the paper to combust. Passionate content aside, my mother typed with a furious energy because she made six to ten carbon copies of each letter and so had to beat her machine as she pounded the keys.

  In those days (for those who don’t know) carbon copies were made by putting a layer of carbon paper between each thin airmail paper sheet so that the force of the little hammers—typebars—striking the page would carry through to the sheets underneath, marking them with the carbon from the carbon sheets. Physical pressure was needed to stamp the letters through the many sheets, and the more sheets, the more violence was needed to make the typebars fly and hit the page with a “thwack!” Mom pounded so hard on the keys that the top sheet of paper always had holes in it as if the letters had been fired at the paper by a machine gun.

  Mom would make up to ten copies at a time by feeding a thick wad of paper sandwiched with her carbon sheets into her huge old typewriter. She even did this when typing her books, producing multiple copies of even the first draft of manuscripts that later she’d fight editors over.

  Mom always looked fierce when her manuscripts came back marked up with “stupid changes” on them. She refused to change a word.

  “Those Dreadful People,” Mom would say referring to her cowering editors, “just don’t understand me because they’re used to dealing with all those so-called writers in the American Evangelical world who can barely speak English and are just too spiritual, with all their Jesus blah-blah! I write REAL books!”

  To the person reading copy five or six of anything Mom typed, the indistinct carbon-copied words looked like some sort of illustration demonstrating the fuzzy vision endured by cataract sufferers. Since Mom never sent one copy of anything, but always sent copies of every letter (or book) she wrote to her mother, to my sisters, and so forth, any words she wrote were shared by many people. And like Mom herself, every word she wrote seemed permanent and inspired. She treated her own words with the same deference she treated the Bible since God was “speaking” through her, too, and woe betide the cringing editor who did anything more than compliment every last carbon-copied bit of “revelation.”

  “How dare they change it!” Mom would say if an editor insisted. “They can just jolly well write their own books if they have such great ideas!”

  During the visit when I was telling my mother about this book, she asked (repeatedly), “Do you have a good editor, Dear?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, don’t let them change anything, Dear!” said Mom with a flicker of her old fire. “They always wanted my books to be more Evangelical!”

  “I don’t write Evangelical books. The Evangelicals hate my guts.”

  “Pay no attention to those Evangelical Idiots,” said Mom, and then she dozed off again. A moment later she opened her eyes. “And don’t let your editor change anything, my Dear!”

  This time Mom was asleep in her chair. I reached out from where I was sitting at her feet and patted her knee. Mom opened her eyes.

  “Mom, the only reason I’m a writer is because of all the books you read out loud to me. You were a good mother.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “You opened the doors to everything I love most,” I said.

  When Mom was ninety-two, she was taken very ill and put in the hospital. My sister Debby called me and told me to fly over right away. “Otherwise they’ll kill her,” Debby said.

  I sat with Mom for a week night and day because the nurses had “tested” Mom and decided that she would be better off dead. They didn’t put it that way, of course; they just left her untouched food tray in front of her and made no effort to get her to eat or drink. They medicated her into a stupor.

  They had given her some sort of cognitive test made up of questions like “What did you have for breakfast?” or “Who is president of Switzerland?” Good luck with that! They should have asked, “Describe in detail the compound you grew up in when you lived in China.” They would have gotten a wonderful answer and decided Mom was a genius.

  “Poor dear,” said one nurse. “She has no quality of life. She didn’t even know she was in a hospital! You should just let her go.”

  After the nurse walked out of the room—we were in a swanky rehabilitation clinic set in the lovely vineyards above Vevey—Debby said, “See what I mean? They would’ve made good Nazis!”

  These nurses were actually very nice people—if they decided you were worth saving. But they had no old stories to share with Mom. Nor did they know what would draw her out. And Mom didn’t know her nurses. But Debby and I still saw Mom as Mom. And because we knew how to talk to her, we had real conversations. Mom ate because we fed her, and she returned to her home fully recovered. The nurses weren’t evil, just doing the best they could in a country where suicide is legal and no big deal, what with an outfit called Dignitas just up the road in Zurich that—for $5,000—puts “suicide tourists” out of their misery.71

  From Mom’s nurses’ point of view, our mother was not like them. And age is indeed incurable. Mom even appeared vegetablelike to them. To Debby and I she appeared very much human—in other words, still like us.

  Appearances, empathy, and emotion count when it comes to ethics. What human life is, is a messy, inexact business as soon as you include a spiritual component related to consciousness, memory, and pleasure, let alone the ability to make moral choices.

  How ironic that in extreme old age Mom became more her true self than ever, yet was slipping away and so very forgetful. How ironic that those nurses would have let a woman die who still teared up with pleasure when she heard Glenn Gould play Bach or BB King’s “Every Day I Have the Blues.” And this was the same woman whose most treasured possession—which she wore like beloved jewelry—was the backstage pass BB King gave her after they met.

  This meeting took place in the Montreux Palace Hotel. Mom had gone there with my sister Susan for tea just before she got ill. And Mom, of course, met BB King since he “looked so interesting, Dear, so I went right over to speak to him and sat down at his table.” Mom told him which of his songs she always listened to, and King, charmed, sent out his entourage to get tickets and a backstage pass to that night’s concert at the Montreux Jazz Festival. There’s a picture of Mom and King taken backstage in his dressing room framed on the wall above her bed....

  So what is human life? The Christian tradition has produced demarcation lines even after birth to describe human life’s gradual transformation into full personhood, such as the concept of “the age of accountability.” The Roman Catholic Church even invented a “destination” for the souls of unbaptized infants—Limbo. This invention (out of thin air) was to help assuage the distraught parents of dead babies, too young to have committed sins but still cursed by “original sin.” Saint Augustine said that “such infants as quit the body without being baptized will be involved in the mildest condemnation of all.” This “doctrine” was “discovered” in order to cover the not-quite-fully-accountable stage of life and death of babies, such as stillborn infants, who, going strictly by the book in terms of the official fate of the unbaptized sinner, would otherwise have been consigned to burn in Hell. (Dead babies’ prospects have been steadily improving. In 1984 Joseph Ratzinger, then a cardinal, said that he rejected the claim that children who died unbaptized could not “attain salvation.”)

  Absurd theological demarcations aside, just try to apply smug answers pro or con to the life issues in a hospice or the ICU of a major hospital. Talk to the transplant team about to harvest a heart about whether or not to take the donor off life support. See how far purist theological or secular rules—or science—will get you when deciding the fate of even just one actual individual sliding into a vegetative state. Talk to a nurse who doesn’t know to ask your mother about China or her meeting with BB King and instead asks her what day of the week it is and the names of her grandchildren and then draws a blank.

  One factor that is actually more o
f a constant than anything science or religion provides concerning the “life issues” is what I call our innate sense of aesthetic empathy. Mom’s lifelong lament “He had all his fingers and toes!” illustrates what I mean. Aesthetic empathy is that combination of feelings and facts whereby most of us recognize ourselves in others who look like us. We are moved to compassion when confronted by others when we can relate to them. Notice that big-eyed baby seals get support from people but less cute chickens are slaughtered without compunction, and as for all those frog species disappearing—fuggedaboutit!

  When we see a six-month-old fetus in a 3-D ultrasound picture, pro-choice absolutist claims that the fetus is “nothing” and that the woman is everything are rudely disconnected from our actual experience. Conversely, if you didn’t know what to ask Mom and talked to her in her ninety-six-year-old incarnation, you might think she was gaga.

  These days everyone seems to live in separate worlds, as cut off from other people as those nurses were from my mother and for the same reason: We don’t see The Other as being like us. The Internet allows us to entertain ourselves with our own private versions of reality. We stick to “our sort.”

  Even our “facts”—say, that “all Evangelicals are dumb” or that “President Obama is the Antichrist”—are private and need pass no test imposed by actual truth. Our information is as personalized and as “inside” as Mom’s memories became in extreme old age.

  And Mom’s attitude toward her “stupid” editors, opinionated as she was, seems open-minded when compared to today’s blogs and the level of “discourse” that’s become the language of politics post-Roe . The Left, too, has its very own secular fundamentalist versions of Edith Schaeffer. Members of the “open-minded” Left also believe very literally in their own various “scriptures” and special “leading,” if not by God, then by ever-so-correct progressive thinking. But unlike my mother, today’s “true believers” of the Left and Right are not as polite as Mom was and much less compassionate, let alone tolerant.

  For instance, consider the poisoning of our shared public space as illustrated by what has befallen the nomination Senate hearings for future Supreme Court justices. “To Bork” entered the American vocabulary as a reference to the way pro-choice Democrats savaged—and lied about—Ronald Reagan’s antiabortion (but otherwise qualified) nominee for a seat on the Supreme Court. President Reagan nominated Robert Bork for the Supreme Court on July 1, 1987. Within forty-five minutes of Bork’s nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy took to the Senate floor condemning Bork in a nationally televised incendiary speech declaring:Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government.... President Reagan is still our president but he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice!

  Since the Bork “hearings,” the whole process of confirmation hearings has become a politicized farce in which candidates for seats on the Court have to say as little as possible of substance. Because of Roe and the reaction to it, each new Supreme Court justice begins his or her life as a justice by first being infantilized in front of the whole nation in a Kabuki play of staged hypocrisy. Ironically, Roe has kept the debate on abortion alive and well. Since abortion was being legalized state by state before 1973, Roe and Bolton—not the legalization of abortion per se—needlessly set back the progressive movement by poisoning American politics. At a stroke the Supreme Court handed America (and the Left in particular) a time bomb and then walked away. The collateral damage spins into a violence-blighted future with no end in sight.

  Had abortion been legalized in a more moderate way and/or on a state-by-state basis—as we’ve seen was already happening with minimal controversy before Roe—there would have been fights, but nothing like the societywide meltdown that followed. And I’m not alone in pointing this out. There are many pro-choice critiques of Roe besides the one I’m making. For instance, in a 2007 interview Justice John Paul Stevens said that Roe “create [d] a new doctrine that really didn’t make sense” and that if Justice Blackmun “could have written a better opinion, that ... might have avoided some of the criticism.”72 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg criticized the decision for terminating a democratic movement to liberalize abortion laws.73

  Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox wrote, “[Roe’s] failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations.... Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution.”74 Professor Laurence Tribe (a scholar of the Constitution) said, “One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.”75 Law professors Alan Dershowitz, Cass Sunstein, and Kermit Roosevelt also criticized Roe.

  Abortion—as defined by Roe and Bolton—remains the constant irritant that keeps both the public and Congress polarized. It does this by elevating policy differences to the level of winner-take-all hysterical accusations of “murder!” from one side and “misogyny!” from the other.

  Roe set back the prospects of progressives. How would you like to hitch your fortunes to a story like this?76 And, sure, this horror is not Roe’s “fault,” but a leader who decides to dig in his or her heels and defend late-term abortions will always be cast as a villain by events that tend to outrun platitudes:While this week’s [January 20, 2011] indictment involving a grisly abortion mill in Philadelphia has shocked many, the grand jury’s nearly 300-page report also contains a surprising and littlenoted revelation: In the mid-1990s, the administration of Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, a pro-choice Republican, ended regular inspections of abortion clinics—a policy that continued until just last year.... Pennsylvania health officials deliberately chose not to enforce laws to ensure that abortion clinics provide the same level of care as other medical service providers.

  The District Attorney’s office this week charged an abortion doctor, Kermit Gosnell, with murder and infanticide. Nine other workers at the abortion clinic, the Women’s Medical Society, also face charges. According to the prosecutors, Gosnell and his associates not only broke state law by performing abortions after 24 weeks—they also killed live babies by stabbing them with scissors and cutting their spinal cords....

  The Pennsylvania Department of Health abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics at all. The politics in question were not anti-abortion, but pro. With the change of administration from Governor Casey to Governor Ridge, officials concluded that inspections would be “putting a barrier up to women” seeking abortions.77

  Many Evangelicals and Roman Catholics I know would have long ago been voting for progressive candidates (i.e., Democrats) because these voters (particularly young people) are sick and tired of the Republican Party’s slide into the role of Far Right war machine/shill for corporate America. Many religious people have become increasingly sympathetic to gay rights, favor closing the gap between rich and poor, and root for policies that foster racial diversity. They want immigration justice. They’re for cutting back the bloated defense establishment, and they favor the conservation of the environment. If it weren’t for the needlessly sweeping way abortion was legalized, as defined by Roe and Bolton, the Evangelicals and the many Roman Catholics who joined them would not have been manipulated into voting as a Republican Party bloc since 1973.

  After the election of 2008, a student poll conducted at Gordon College (an Evangelical school in Massachusetts) found that about 20 percent of the students had voted for Obama. For the first time ever during that year’s election, a
group of the Evangelical students on campus even opened a student Democratic Party office. And though the powers that be at Gordon knew I was a vocal Obama supporter, I was invited to speak in chapel shortly after the election and talked about why I supported President Obama, “in spite of the abortion issue,” as my support was described by the person introducing me.

  After my talk many students told me that they had wanted to vote for Obama but could not “because of abortion.” When I asked them to elaborate, the students spoke about the horror they felt over late-term abortions, the very extremes (late-term abortion) Doe v. Bolton opened the door to by “clarifying” Roe’s fuzzy, inexact permissiveness and allowing abortion of babies that—given today’s medical advances—might live outside the womb.78 It seems that these young Evangelicals were telling me that their “becauseof-abortion” reluctance to vote for any Democrat Party candidate was less about abortion per se than about the fact that Bolton and Roe allow abortion at any stage of fetal development.

  I think that these students’ views were also about something else: that since Roe demolished the state-by-state approach, the ruling has remained a perpetual insult to many Americans. This wound won’t heal. Abortion rights rulings were not like civil rights rulings wherein there was plenty of biblical material within various religious traditions to move people’s hearts to accept men and women of other races as brothers and sisters. There is nothing warm and fuzzy about abortion. “Doing unto others” doesn’t translate well into eliminating a fetus.